Inconvenient Truth: Climate Fixes Wasted

Environmentalists too often undercut their well-intentioned warnings with fearmongering, hand ringing & dearth of practical solutions staring them in the face. Consider California’s failure to store & use winter rains.

The WSJ op ed criticized this inexplicable mismanagement in its “Water Is a Terrible Thing to Waste” this way: “California’s political leaders are obsessed with climate, so why don’t they prepare for droughts or deluges? The atmospheric rivers that are sweeping the parched Golden State should be a cause for relief, but they’ve instead given way to catastrophic floods and enormous water waste. Scientists last fall forecast another warm and dry winter following three of California’s driest years on record. Yet storms this winter have already dropped tens of trillions of gallons of water across the state and more than a dozen feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Alas, little of the storm runoff is getting captured.”

The editors essentially blame the states politicians and the political games they play with the environmental movement that began in the 1970s. But, as the editors observed, California’s problems rarely stay within the state and affect others around it. In fact, couldn’t it be said that what happens in the climate-leading Golden State worms its way across the USA? If so, 50-plus years after saving the earth became a priority for just about everyone except the deniers, isn’t it about time the environmentalists themselves in California and elsewhere show they’ve matured by more often using common sense in solving the problems they see as well?

Davd Soul